Grounded autonomous research: a fault-tolerant LLM pipeline from corpus to manuscript in frontier computational physics

Fault-tolerant LLM pipeline achieves autonomous end-to-end research in computational physics

Researchers present a multi-phase LLM pipeline that autonomously processes 11,083 condensed-matter physics arXiv papers, conceives a research direction, calibrates methodology against published references, runs first-principles computations, and produces a publication-grade manuscript on altermagnetic piezomagnetism. The system operates across 47 fresh-context sessions with 2,162 literature-consultation events, using redundancy and adversarial review for fault tolerance, with human intervention limited to operational knowledge curation at reproduction failures rather than scientific direction. Ablation experiments isolate 'structurally enforced numerical confrontation' at calibration checkpoints as the key mechanism preventing hallucination in physical science domains. The work extends autonomous research agents beyond ML sandboxes into high-stakes physical science, where external literature anchors replace execution-based calibration.